THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN YOUR EGO AND YOUR TRUE SELF

All
this week, one word has been lingering at the forefront of my mind. That word
is Ego.

Early this week, I finally polished up the first draft of my manuscript What My Mother Never Taught Me - The 7 Things I Wished I Had Known About
Finding Happiness and sent it off to a panel for review and comment.

I had thought that the prevailing emotion that I would feel was that of joy
seeing that the manuscript is now finally complete and ready for public
viewing. Instead, after I hit the 'Send' button on my email, I was filled with
an emotion that I couldn't quite articulate. It was a mix between fear and
anxiety. It was an emotion I didn't expect and wasn't prepared for.

That afternoon, I tried to distract myself by tucking into a Cathy Kelly volume
at a local café but while my eyes were focused on the words on the page, all I
could feel was the slight tremble in my hands and my knees, feeling the hollow
and emptiness in my quivering heart. I will be honest in saying that I was
scared shitless. It was a combination of feeling like I had stripped myself
bare, standing stark naked in public for all eyes to see, and also an anxiety
at how the public would react to what they have seen. When I finally gave up on
my attempt at reading the Cathy Kelly book, I got up and walked home.

It was on my way home, walking down the quiet street lined with Victorian
terraces that I started to talk to myself out loud (which I often do when I'm
alone). It was one of the number of ways I use to find that voice in me that is
my true self, separate from that part of me that is the ego—the false sense of
self. In my head, both voices sounded the same. It was hard to distinguish the
true self from the ego based on my internal monologue, so I had to do a
dialogue with myself to get it out of my head into the open space.

I knew that unsettling feeling came from the ego because it ultimately led back
to the underlying need to please, the need for other people's approval. I had
sent off the manuscript for critique as part of the process to improve it, not
realizing that underneath it lay the tacit need for external validation. That
was why I was fearful—I was fearful that the manuscript wasn't good enough, and
because it was an extension of me, I was fearful that I wasn't good enough.

In the first week of Oprah's Life Class, Eckhart Tolle had talked about the
ego—the false sense of self being what the mind accepts as its identity based
on other people's perception and expectations. He had cited a number of Asian
countries like China, Japan and South Korea where young people commit suicide
because of the pressure and the need to meet parents' and elders' expectations
as an example of the ego at work.

Hearing him say that struck a chord within me. Growing up in an Asian household
where children are constantly being compared against others and told that they
need to do better all the time, I know exactly what it feels like to constantly
have to do and achieve before I would be considered 'good enough'. There was a
reward tied to meeting my parents' expectations and there was also punishment
tied to not meeting my parents' expectations. It is under these conditioning
that I often feel that what I was worth was contingent upon how other people
view me. Even after I had that awareness that all that was just fiction, there
were still moments when I was dominated by my ego.

Eckhart Tolle talked about the two modalities of ego. The first being the need
to use other people to increase our worth, an example being trophy wives (or
husbands) who use their spouse's image to increase their own worth. The second
being the feeling that someone else's success or happiness takes something away
from us, in other words, the feeling of envy.

The need to use others and the feeling of envy are both the ego—the false sense
of self—at work. The ego operates on the basis that our worth is determined by
external perception—the clothes that we wear, the size of our house, the number
of digits on our pay cheques etc. While enjoying these things are fine, being
dependent on them for our self-worth is not. Having been through my own
suffering for a number of years, being completely lost and confused about who I
was, I have personally experienced that all that 'stuff' means nothing when it
comes to asserting my self-worth.

Oprah gave very sage advice when it came to identifying the voice of the ego.
She said that the voice of the ego often comes in the form of the question—What
do you think? It's when we are unsure of who we are and what we are doing that
we often ask others, “What do you think I should do?” hoping that their answers
would satisfy us. It gave me a different perspective on what I have always
believed to be true—that all the answers to my questions are already inside me,
I just need to peel away all the layers that are masking them. These layers
could be past programming, old conditioning, beliefs and expectations—both my
own and others.

I'm not saying that the ego is my enemy, what I'm saying is that not being
aware of the ego and not controlling the ego is my enemy.

One of the most important things that I value in life is my right to be my
authentic self. I truly believe that distinguishing who I am authentically and
naturally from who I think people expect me to be is the real key to uncovering
my purpose in life.

Ultimately the most important question is this — Are you happy? Are you truly
happy with your life? If you are, it would be safe to say that you are living
in your true self, because your true self knows that you matter, that you are
here on purpose. Your true self knows that exactly who you are is good enough.